Any outline of intelligence is meaningless and sterile unless it deals immediately with spirit, for spirit is the central nexus of human experience. Nor can spirit be added as an afterthought, like salt thrown in to a flavor stew, or a sweet postscript added for the spiritually inclined, like a politician throwing in a reference to the Lord with a tremorous, pious voice. Spirit must be foremost in our consideration from the beginning if development is to be seen in its full scope.
-Joseph Chilton Pearce, author Magical Child to Magical Teen
How can we expect our children to grow up and create the kind of peaceful world we’d like them to live in if we don’t give them both the vision and the skills to do it?
We’ve been raising generations of children to become good consumers and better workers, but they’re turning out to be consumers and workers without spirit or soul. There is a great and appropriate push in this country to make our children better educated, i.e. to focus on “The New Three R’s,” science, technology, and the computer skills that will be required to succeed in a 21st Century world. However, in most public schools while students spend time focusing on passing their state tests and meeting the “No Child Left Behind” mono-cultural educational standards, we have mostly wiped out time and funding for music, art, theater, and other creative classes. And yet the arts have long been proven to help children develop aesthetic, cultural and moral values – as well as a better self-understanding and a connection to, for lack of a better word, their souls.
The arts even provide context and a deeper understanding for the very scholastic subjects we are concerned our children are not passing today, such as language and mathematics. Unfortunately, public education seems more interested in getting kids through the system than it is in making sure our children are actually learning and growing emotionally. But we cannot place the blame on the system itself, for we are participants in creating that system.
Now, more than ever before, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to support our children in their emotional and spiritual growth to become the leaders needed to bring our world to the future they deserve. And we need to ask ourselves if education in values is really the responsibility of the government in the first place.
We also need to question whether the education we seek for our children is really for our children, or whether, perhaps, it needs to be for ourselves first. “Mention parenting or early childhood education and people naturally think about children,” says Micheal Mendizza, co-author of Magical Parent Magical Child with Joseph Chilton Pearce. “Children don’t need early childhood education. Parenting is about adults. We hear the words “parenting is about adults,” nod our heads up and down but deep down we know it’s really about kids. This prejudice is blinding.”
As adults we may be blind to the obvious, but our children are not. Values are learned by experience and by what children see, not only in their own homes but in the world they live in. All one has to do is turn on the nightly news to see that the “grown ups” aren’t ‘getting it’ either culturally or morally. How can we with our sole focus bent on consumerism, competition, and getting ahead? As far as values are concerned, we have become more of a “do as I say not as I do” society.
So what are our children to do? Without a real commitment to shift our adult values, how can we teach our children? And without a shift, how will real and necessary change in this world occur? “We want our kids to be happy, successful, secure, productive, engaged participants in the social web called life,” says Mendizza, “In order to develop these qualities in children we have to experience and express them ourselves. We need to model all the great things we want for our children. That means you and I must be healthy, sane, intelligent, creative, happy, successful, secure, productive, engaged participants in the social web called life.”
More important than our kids learning the “The New Three R’s,” as parents we need to develop our own inner strength and values and then teach our children perspectives and attitudes that will enable them to get along with others, resolve conflict without wars, and be cooperative members of a global society. We need to practice ourselves, and thus, by example, teach our children “The Four C’s” – consciousness, caring, compassion, and conflict resolution. Not to mention respect for self and others, kindness, and service.
This is a meaningful change of emphasis in regards to parenting, and in complete alignment with Joseph Chilton Pearce’s basic points about effective early childhood education, which are:
- Understand the model imperative
- Take your cues from the child, and
- Play on the surface and allow optimum learning to take place beneath the level of our awareness
Studies indicate that 95% of what a child learns occurs via direct experience during the course of everyday life. The rest is what they pick up from school. So who are the greatest models for children every day? Who do our young children idolize and desire to emulate most? Us – mom and dad.
“Watching dad change a tire, for example, involves technical information, which way to turn the lug-nuts, and emotional information, the inner state – calm, frustrated, anxious, angry – dad is experiencing as he goes through the process,” Mendizza says. “Think of King Midas and the golden touch. Every child we relate to is uplifted and inspired or dragged down by our positive or negative state when we touch them. How we do things is much more important, at least for children, than what we do.”
When you stop to think about it, Pearce’s three basic points are all about modeling. First we need to understand the critical need for providing an enlightened model for our children. Then we need to take our cues from them as to how they want us to model and what they are asking us to model. And finally we need to remember to model via play, which is the child’s – and actually adult’s Optimum state for learning and performance lifelong.
To assist parents in learning what healthy attitudes and actions to model, and to help them learn how to best model them, various programs are cropping up around the country. In addition to the Waldorf Schools and most Montessori programs, there are community projects like the Nurturing Project recently started by Mendizza. The Nurturing Project Project revolutionizes the way local communities mentor and support parents and the people who care for children. The project is based on and embodies Pearce’s “model imperative.” It helps parents and providers recognize the difference between healthy and unhealthy modeling. It also helps teach them how to interact with their children in a healthy fashion by developing parent’s listening and communication skills, teaching them how to reduce stress and conflict, and to develop critical and creative thinking skills. Interestingly, the Project teaches parents through direct experience and modeling which is provided by community mentors in the business, health services and childcare industries.
In a nutshell what does this mean for you and your child? Mahatma Gandhi really did have it right when he said, “Be the change that you want to see.” Every parent has a story about some time when their child copied a behavior from them that they wished they hadn’t, and I can certainly think of a few with my daughter! So we’re not perfect and we probably never will be. But I believe if we can strive to live together in respect, and be healthy, engaged participants in the ‘social web called life’, that we can achieve a greater consciousness for ourselves and ultimately our children.
- Suggested reading: Magical Parent – Magical Child – by Joeseph Chilton Pearce and Michael Mendizza. Featured in this article: Excerpts from the essay “Kids are Not The Problem” by Michael Mendizza. Read the entire essay at www.nurturing.us.
- Michael Mendizza is the founder of Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning design center, and producer of The Nurturing Project, a community based, systems approach to the mentoring and support of parents and the people who care for their children.
Posted in November, 2007
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